Background:

Cinolla is a UK software company that builds an application for managing reservations, payments, contacts and reminders for activity centers such as spas, outdoor activity groups and athletic centers. They employ developers around the UK that need to remotely access Amazon and Rackspace servers as well as servers on their office LAN to develop and deploy their software application. David Harding is the Technical Director at Cinolla.

Business Challenge:

To facilitate remote access for their developers, Cinolla was using a Cisco small business router with VPN capabilities, but there were a number of challenges with this solution. Performance was slow because the traffic from remote developers had to run through their offices and back out to their cloud servers, causing a "trombone" effect. This not only slowed response time but also took up additional bandwidth on the office Internet link. Additionally, remote users did not have static IP addresses and without a VPN, they would be exposing these IP addresses. Finally, they were looking at closing their office and becoming a completely virtual organization, so David wanted to eliminate their Cisco router.

Alternatives:

It was clear that traditional hardware VPN solutions would not be a good fit within a completely virtual organization. Further, VPC services were not an option because Cinolla uses both Rackspace and Amazon servers. Even if they consolidated to one service provider, which was not optimal for business continuity, the servers were across zones, making deployment complex.

Solution:

David deployed Pertino across several operating systems as a test (Mac, Windows, Ubuntu and RHEL), using the Pertino free 30-day trial. Pertino deployed quickly, and remote developers instantly had the access they needed without additional security issues. The developers were ecstatic because performance also dramatically improved without the need to SSH into their servers. With Pertino’s always-on connection, they could also easily run their backups across cloud providers. David calls Pertino his headache free VPC.

Benefits:

Cinolla has now eliminated the costs associated with their physical office, improved performance for their remote developers, provided secure access across their cloud servers and has a platform that can grow with them as they expand their business. Going forward, they are considering using Pertino’s Puppet manifests for even easier server and network deployment.